The lack of recent posts has been, in large part, due to the fact that I’ve been rebuilding my website at www.michaelcsnell.com from the ground up. Not only is it a total redesign with expanded and updated galleries, it’s also the beginning of a new effort to have tutorial content, books and other products on the site.

For a long time my website has been a fairly static portfolio site. Now I want to push it in a more dynamic direction where I can expand on some of the things I do here on the blog. The portfolio will still be there — and more robust — but I’m really excited about the addition of two new sections of the site: the Toolbox and the Store.

The Toolbox will be my place to share tips and tutorials. I’ve started with the obligatory “What’s in my bag?” article but plan to add many more on photography, post-processing, workflow, etc. I’ll wait until CS6 and LR4 are officially released but there might be some Photoshop actions and Lightroom presets on their way, too. So much to do, so little time, but it will be fun to see where all of this leads.

The Store is where I’ll be launching several lines of books and maybe a few other surprises. The first books I’ll focus on are what I’m calling “The Journals of a Travel Photographer” series. These will essentially be “scrapbooks” of the images I’ve made during specific trips, whether it was a weekend in St. Louis or two weeks in Thailand. I’m also planning a series of “how to” books (or possibly e-books so that they can be a bit more dynamic) and there are ideas bouncing around for a few art books, too. I’ll announce it here on the blog when new books become available but I’ve also put links on the site where you can sign up to be put on our e-mailing list for new product announcements.

There’s more info about all of this on the site. Check it out — and sorry if there are still a few bugs in the system. It just launched a few hours ago and it’s definitely in a “phase one” state. Much, much more to come…